The Royal Society has announced the latest cohort to be elevated to the fellowship. As always, the climatologists are prominent: with Ted Shepherd and Corinne Le Quere getting the nod. Adair Turner seems to have wheedled an honorary fellowship for himself as well.

Reader Comments (175)

aTTP. I believe others have adequately answered your questions to me [you can't even go shopping for half an hour without people leaping out of the woodwork to help out!!].

I would only add that I was never a convert to the IPCC message, ever since their first report where they failed to supply the necessary evidence in support of their contention that there was a link between increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and increasing global temperatures. This was then compounded by the rushed publication of this supposed evidence, which turned out to be based on cherry-picked data.

One of the main planks supporting the link, the correlation between CO2 changes and temperature estimates from ice cores also self destructed when more detailed studies showed temperature rises before CO2 increases. Yet the IPCC support network, knowing this, continued to use it as supporting evidence.

I have no reason to believe in IPCC defined AGW, nor in those who have conducted miserable science advocacy in support of it. Period!

… it is extremely unlikely that more than 50% of our recent warming could be non-anthropogenic.

Okay, so not categorically part-caused by humans, but extremely unlikely not to have been part-caused by humans – i.e. extremely likely to have been part-caused by humans. Thus:

So, what you are saying is that, yes, warming has happened before, and we cannot determine precisely what caused the warming, but this time, we can categorically say that it is extremely likely that humans are part of its cause.

RR,The IPCC statement comes from standard frequentist hypothesis testing. The hypothesis being tested is that more than 50% of our recent warming (since 1950) could be non-anthropogenic. This is rejected at the more than 95% level. In other words, it is extremely likely that more than 50% was anthropogenic. As far as past warming/cooling is concerned, there is little - if anything - that contradicts our current understanding of what could cause warming/cooling.

aTTP: so, I repeat – you accept that the IPCC acknowledge that warming (and cooling) has happened in the past, for reasons that have yet to be determined, but are adamant that what warming that has occurred in the recent past has to have a significant (unless you do not consider 50% to be significant) human influence, within a 95% confidence limit. Which is rather odd, considering that, since 1950, there was about 25 years of cooling, and there has only been a period of about 23 years when there has been any significant warming, with nearly 20 years of no significant change; all this despite the rise in CO2 being more or less continuous – in other words, the perceived link between the two is remarkably tenuous. Svenmark’s cosmic rays theory fits more closely with the evidence, and has done for the past 200 million years, which is more than can be said for the human-generated GHG theory, yet you appear to summarily dismiss it.

The hypothesis being tested is that more than 50% of our recent warming (since 1950) could be non-anthropogenic. This is rejected at the more than 95% level. In other words, it is extremely likely that more than 50% was anthropogenic.

Yes, but this is because the IPCC was setup, only to investigate the alleged forcing from increased (anthropogenic) atmospheric CO2. All other possible possible explanations for the late 20th century warming (solar-magnetic, long term ocean cycles, long term orbital and natural variation cycles) have been ignored. The IPCC, while it may have had scientific origins, was soon hijacked and has become an essentially political entity, and science is much the poorer for it.

Welcome to the Inter-glacial, everyone! The previous four were as warm or warmer than today! No fossil fuel burning back then! I am reminded by the mindset of officialdom, & a TV programme broadcast about the Sun, several years ago now on BBC2. The "science" was impressive, the pictures & photography fascinating, right up until the penultimate scene of the Sun, & the narrator (a simple actor paid to read what's in front of him), said, "No-one can explain what effect the power of the Sun has on the Earth's climate, but whatever it is, it has already been overpowered by anthropogenic global warming!", cut to scene of an icebegr carving from a glacier! Oh the wonderful BBC. We don't know what effect element A has upon element B, but whatever it is, it's already been overpowered by element C! Great science! Not!

Furthermore, attribution is keyed to sensitivity, and the higher the sensitivity the colder we would now be without man's efforts. You had better hope that the recovery from the Little Ice Age, the coldest times of a declining Holocene, have been primarily natural, for if man is responsible for the recovery, we haven't enough fossil fuels to keep it up much longer.

Yet further, Alan, the warming by man is not only likely mild, but it has been, is and will continue to be net beneficial. Combine that beneficial warming with the miraculous greening and the tremendous social progress, and the burning of fossil fuels has been, is and will continue to be a good thing.

The extraordinary popular delusion of catastrophism has been a tragically destructive madness of the crowd.=====================

Yes, but this is because the IPCC was setup, only to investigate the alleged forcing from increased (anthropogenic) atmospheric CO2. All other possible possible explanations for the late 20th century warming (solar-magnetic, long term ocean cycles, long term orbital and natural variation cycles) have been ignored.

Interesting. You've never actually opened an IPCC Assessment Report, then.

you accept that the IPCC acknowledge that warming (and cooling) has happened in the past, for reasons that have yet to be determined

No, in many cases we have a pretty good understanding of what has caused past warming and cooling events. Not perfect. Not complete. There are some that are better understood than others. However, there is little to indicate that these past events provide some kind of fundamental challenge to our understand of AGW.

Heh, Phil, condescension is not persuasive to the members of the jury who have reasonable doubt that nature has been investigated adequately in the obvious rush to judgement about man's role in the crime, which, parenthetically is not a crime but rather an accidental act of benevolence.=======================

There simply is no verifiable consistent record of reasonable size, of sun activity vs our climateThere simply is no verifiable consistent record of reasonable size, of Galactic Cosmic Irradiation and its consequences on our climate.There simply is no verifiable consistent record of reasonable size of our Oceans dynamic behaviour vs our climate.There simply is no verifiable consistent record of life on the planet and its impact on climate of any reasonable size.

the GCM method, BTW, is RIDICULOUS, itr departs from pseudo science resembliong to sutras in the quran, and builds from there. A reasonable approach would be Hadamard's, NOT "navier Stokes equations".

So, So there is no substantial observation, there is no method, there are only belief systems and there is only hot air proffered by snake oil sellers at the service of crony capitalists and their btches: our so called fine establishment, who can , as has been proved over and over not add 2 numbers together reliably.

Kim. I would suppose that you can only be insolent to a person (or if you're so inclined, to a god). Rational people gave up believing in "Nature" as an entity long ago. Although the Gaia hypothesis briefly revived it for a few. Thus wrath from the Earth is not a belief I can subscribe to; but then there's poetry....

Heh, Alan, it's always perilous to make a metaphor too vivid. Nature was neglected, and better understanding will feel like a wrathful judgement to those who've overattributed to man. Nature, of course, doesn't give a damn about their feelings, but they will.===========

It may have been that, in times passed such an elevation was deemed as superlatively prestigious, even, uplifting to one's personal, societal status. Whereas, take my word for it, stalking the corridors where in times past were graced by brilliant Illuminati, nowadays, dimly known and greatly diminished are the lights of the RS.

It should be remarked, these days, to acquire entry into such a club, all it requires is to be animate and a politicized wallah, all mouth and dressed up in green. Adair Turner.............oh God and - really?

Science, is not about toeing the line in the sand, it is all about going against the grain!

So, there may be some ideas about the causes, but they have yet to be definitely determined. Thank you, aTTP: you tell me that I am wrong, then proceed to tell everyone why I am right. You do do an interesting turn in logic.

Now, could you please explain why, other than that we are actually around to observe it, the present warming, such as it has been, is any different from what has happened in the past?

(Oh – and please, please, please do not say anything to the effect of: “But, this time, it's yoomans wot is doing it!”)

You see these politicians, in the UK at least, have almost succeeded in dismantling our industries, and have doubled the cost of our electricity, precisely because they are under the apparent delusion that unless we do so we will contribute to CAGW and hence fry or have to migrate to Antarctica.

I will be most relieved when we can scrap all those windmills, get a few coal fired power stations and repatriate our aluminium and steel industries. I am sure that David Cameron will take the blame for misunderstanding the scientists.

Food rationing ended in the UK in 1954.It's now, allegedly, 2016, yet successive recent governments have actually engineered electricity rationing for large corporate consumers that haven't left the country or gone bankrupt. And they still have plans to extend this rationing to the general population with "smart" meters.

That's definitely going to get a mention in future historical and political texts. English texts might just note the multiple uses of the word "smart".

to whit, from Oxford Dictionaries:

NOUN

1 [MASS NOUN] Sharp stinging pain:'the smart of the recent cuts'1.1 archaic Mental pain or suffering:'sorrow is the effect of smart, and smart the effect of faith'

Not really the elephant in the room as less cloud cover can be seen as the cause of increased temperatures. As we have data on reduced cloud cover during a period of slightly increased surface temperatures then seems a pretty obvious cause and effect. Also seems a much better theory than some of the really complicated ones that seem to be around.

@ Budgie (11:45 PM).Richard Lindzen has suggested Lysenkoism as a possible precedent for the future course of CAGW.Even after Stalin’s death Lysenko and his cronies kept their jobs and his influence only died with them.Because of empirical evidence the ‘dangerous climate change & we must do something’ pack have no alternative but an incremental back-down but as Lindzen suggests the only way the industry will be relegated finally to history is if jobs are not threatened.Reputations and legacies are another matter.

"The essence of science is to be able to have a discourse and discuss pro and cons about hypotheses and theories especially if you claim that the organization you represent has the intention to reach a standard that is at a scientific level. I have found that leading members of PSI show little will to discuss scientific matters and to leave out personal emotions making it close to impossible to have a meaningful dialog.

"Doug Cotton might behave in a miserable way showing his anger towards certain scientists and PSI. Still, the book he has published contains many arguments which deserve a serious and thorough investigation. This is why I have recommended a number of Australian politicians to read what he writes. Much of it is essential in the debate of the IPCC false claims and even the future economies of western countries and even more. "

THE SUN'S DIRECT RADIATION CANNOT EXPLAIN SURFACE TEMPERATURES.

You can't assume (like Postma and Bright-Paul) that the mean of 168W/m^2 could produce a mean temperature above 233K (-40°C) just because the radiation is variable and can reach over 1,000W/m^2 for a very small portion of Earth's surface. The variability actually leads to a LOWER mean temperature than that for steady flux. How would you explain Venus surface temperatures with your conjecture anyway?

That's why the correct paradigm had to be discovered, as I did - https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com

IT’S ABOUT TIME all you CLAUSIUS FANS got it into your heads that (for NON-RADIATIVE HEAT) the Clausius corollary of the Second Law* only applies in a horizontal plane wherein gravitational potential energy does not change and thus does not affect entropy. THIS IS OVERWHELMINGLY IMPORTANT IN REGARD TO PLANETARY TEMPERATURES.

It is NOT radiation that supplies all the necessary thermal energy to maintain a planet's surface temperature - it is free (or "natural") convective heat transfer happening at the molecular level and carrying out the SECOND LAW* process of MAXIMUM ENTROPY PRODUCTION. But you will need to study my paper that arrogant people at PSI rejected in 2013.

* Second law of thermodynamics: “In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems increases.” There's nothing in there about heat from hot to cold.

Alan Kendall, I dunno, but Dot Cotton was in EastEnders, and always caused trouble. Doug Cotton appears on climate blogs, and can be relied upon to cause trouble. All 17 sides of the climate debate can at least agree on something.

Chris Hanley, I take your point about the eventual decline and fall of Lysenkoism but (i) CAGW is global, not limited to one dictatorship with a controlled press, and (ii) we have the internet. I'm afraid I have a more vengeful nature than you: when CAGW collapses I want to see jobs lost and, more importantly, individual reputations publicly destroyed whilst their possessors still live.

Phil D.,And if AGW isn't some kind of massive world-wide conspiracy and all those scientists who have been warning of potential risks associated with continuing to emit CO2 into the atmosphere are not wrong? What then?

Whoa, there, Mr K and Gwen! Do not be so dismissive of another’s point; that is just what you are so willing to accuse the Believers of doing, and is not one of their traits that you want to emulate. Follow the link provided, and read it (it is quite long, I’m afraid). While I do not have time to go through it all, yet, what I have does make it look very interesting.

aTTP: so tell us – what then? The world will continue to warm a little – great! We could all do with a good summer, for a change, and the prospect of milder winters, as we have just experienced, is very enticing. Is it going to end in catastrophe? Well, you keep telling us that that idea is a “denier” construct, yet you keep warning us that it is all going to end in catastrophe. As dissonance goes, that is a doozy.

We can all live in our own dream world. You have shown us yours; why not open your eyes and see what the real world looks like?

Imagine for a moment a planet in which there were no manmade net forcings. Would the graph of global temperature be a perfectly horizontal flat line? Of course not, there are stochastic fluctuations caused by natural variability, mainly ocean current oscillations, and responses to natural forcings, mainly volcanoes, insolation changes etc. These variations can be large in the short term compared to the gradual effect of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Teasing out the 'signal' from the noise is admittedly tricky however what we would expect to see is natural variation continuing but superimposed on a gradual upward trend, (and despite Kim's poetic licence there are patterns in greenhouse warming, eg changes in DTR, stratospheric cooling, that are fingerprints of GHG-forced warming that enable attribution).

Bearing in mind that there are other GHGs than CO2, my answer would be that if the global temperature anomaly fell below the 95% spread of models that used actual forcings and stayed there for a significant period, say 5-10 years, then this would cast serious doubt on the robustness of our understanding, and a policy rethink.

Sorry, Mr K, perhaps I should have been more enlightening – it was your apparent dismissal of the post from Climate Researcher, above your comment about Doug Cotton. CR gives a link to another site, where the arguments from Doug Cotton (whoever he may be), are mooted. I still have yet to read it in its entirety, but from what I have seen, it does offer some interesting alternatives to the usual “CO2 is going to kill us!” meme; a meme which, bizarrely, while predicting a forthcoming catastrophe, it not a prediction of a forthcoming catastrophe, if the likes of and Then There is Physics is to be believed. It’s all rather confusing really…

p.s. keep your spellchecker under proper lock and key – they can be dangerous if left to roam free!

"Bearing in mind that there are other GHGs than CO2, my answer would be that if the global temperature anomaly fell below the 95% spread of models that used actual forcings and stayed there for a significant period, say 5-10 years, then this would cast serious doubt on the robustness of our understanding, and a policy rethink."

Well I am pleasantly surprised and will take your posts much more seriously.

On the other hand aTTP refuses to answer a straightforward question and leaves me with the impression that he, unfortunately, is an irrational dogmatist.

I want to emphasize that my decision is in large part due to the influence he has had on others, and how those people have magnified the problem. I’m all for new ways of looking at physics, but when one can so easily refute his views (e.g. with a simple hand-held infrared thermometer), it is clear that he is immune to evidence.

just about every sceptical climate blog has had similar problems with Mr. Cotton posting his own brand of physics under his real and/or list of sockpuppet names and fake emails. We’ve heard that even the Prinicipia/Slayers have un-welcomed him, and over the weekend, it seems critical mass has been achieved as new blogs weighed in via emails behind the scenes.

And what if the “net forcings” that are claimed to be man-made are not actually man-made? Could it not be possible that many of the “forcings” that are being attributed to human activity are merely fluctuations in the general balance of things? No matter how you want to swing it, correlation does NOT necessarily mean causation.

You give us a short list of variables that could have some effect, with at least one have dominance over others (“… mainly ocean current oscillations…”), as if these have all been categorically isolated, identified and verified. Sorry, but no: they remain suppositions; while we have commenced studying the system, we have a long way to go before we can have full confidence in any of the stochastics mooted.

My own fear is that we are soon to realise you losing your bet, as the world turns to another mini ice age. I do hope that does not happen, and the world does resume the gentle warming.

RR I am bereft. My Cotten blog was a, now obviously failed, attempt at humour and reflected no dismissiveness of Doug Cotton's link. However, I know he has been banished by Roy Spencer who also has dismissed his theories... Consequently I've tended to ignore him.

The revenge of the AMO: http://notrickszone.com/2016/05/01/north-atlantic-heat-content-plunges-meteorologist-warns-of-serious-implications-on-us-climate-sea-ice/

We shall soon be back to 1970s' weather, even before end 2018, the formal start to the new Little Ice Age as sunspots cease to appear in SC25. You heard it here first folks, and there is near zero CO2-AGW to cheer up the eco-fascists.

And what if the “net forcings” that are claimed to be man-made are not actually man-made? Could it not be possible that many of the “forcings” that are being attributed to human activity are merely fluctuations in the general balance of things?

Not really. We know with some precision how much atmospheric burdens of GHGs have increased and the effect these will have on the planetary radiative balance. Eg Myhre et al 1998 finds well mixed greenhouse gases produce a positive forcing of 2.25 W/m2, +/- 5%.

Objects with a positive radiative imbalance have to rise in temperature, or else we rewrite thermodynamics.

PS re: 'Forcings', that radiative physics' concept is based on badly misinterpreting Max Planck's writings of 1914. To claim radiant exitances are real energy fluxes only applies to the case of radiative equilibrium in a vacuum between black body emitters. It cannot apply to the atmosphere with scattering and absorption making the thermodynamics irreversible.

In that case, only the net energy flux and net radiation entropy production rate are real. Goody and Yung got it badly wrong; read Planck's work and learn why (only recommended for the pure of heart though).

Mr K.: ah, yes… Gwen. My extensive research of making one guess and an attempt at humour, I have determined that a certain Charlie, G is using the cunning device of a pseudonym of her initials as represented in the international phonetic alphabet as Golf Charlie, while her real name is Gwendoline Caroline, a well-known (to a few people…well… at least one person…) agit-prop of the WI, indulging in knit-ins and jam-bakes to drive her evolutionary ethos of hard work and common sense deep into the hearts of academe.

We know with some precision how much atmospheric burdens of GHGs have increased…

What a curious choice of word: “burdens”, as if this increase is a bad thing. Can you be so sure of that, particularly when the “burdens” have been considerably greater in times past, and life has burgeoned and thrived. Also, is this increase really the “fault” (as is being implied) of humans? Is correlation the same as causation, in your world? What about the other times in history and prehistory when the “burdens” have increased (or decreased), without the presence of humans for monitoring or to blame?

Presumably, this was done in the limited confines of a laboratory; does this effect exist within the considerably more dynamic environs of the atmosphere? Would it be detectable? If not, other than supposition that what can happen in controlled environments will happen in less controlled environments, can you really be sure that this is so?